Amazing Talk of the Evolution of Free Time

Clay Shirky gives a talk at the recent Web 2.0 conference talking about where people find the time to do activities on line.  After you get done wincing at the "Web 2.0" part, take a look. He draws a correlation between the shift to an industrial society and the shift to an online society. At the turn of the last century, the cultural shift was so great that society numbed itself with gin.  He maintains that for the past 50 years, they big cultural shock was this amazing amount of free time.  Post World War II, people started working more and more five day work weeks and didn’t know what to do with the free time.  Society numbed itself this time with TV.

It is an interesting talk.  Most folks I know that are hardcore "online people" watch little to no TV. Those that do bought TiVo years ago to compress what they do watch ("TV on your schedule" was an early tag line.) They usually view TV as an another information source and loop it in with others in their life.

Props to Lifehacker for linking to the video.  A transcript of the talk is on Clay’s website.